Endemic becomes the first invite-only NFT marketplace on Aurora

6 min readDec 15, 2021

We are partnering with Aurora, built on top of the Near protocol!

You’ve probably heard earlier this year that Aurora launched on NEAR Protocol. As that announcement said, Aurora takes advantage of NEAR’s many unique features, including sharding and developer gas fee remuneration. It will provide an Ethereum Layer-2 Experience boosted with Near sharding technology and many other exceptional features you can read about in this blog post.

Why are we telling you this now?

Because this collaboration was the key motive for the Endemic team to make Endemic the first NFT marketplace on Aurora. Alongside all the fantastic features Aurora has, we saw the most value in the second Aurora’s core component — Aurora Bridge. Based on the Rainbow Bridge technology, it provides the permissionless transfer of tokens and data between Ethereum and Aurora.

Check out below what this collaboration could mean for you.

Endemic + Aurora partnership brings up a number of enhancements

Here are just some of them:

Warp speed. Aurora is able to host thousands of transactions per second, representing an increase of 70x on tx finality compared to Ethereum 1.0.
ETH currency on Aurora. Well-known UI and UX. The usual MetaMask wallet flows with the Endemic platform.
Future-proof ecosystem. The sharding approach of the underlying NEAR Protocol provides for horizontal EVM scaling, with asynchronous communication between multiple Aurora shards.
Trustless bridge. Stable and trustless bridge to Ethereum where you can move all your Ethereum assets to Aurora, including ERC-20 tokens (already available), NFTs, contract calls, and contract state (in development).
Smart contracts. Aurora is fully compliant with Ethereum, which means every smart contract change made on Endemic can be deployed to Aurora without any difficulties or high fees, making the development of features amazingly fast and efficient.
No more high fees. Aurora fees are up to 1,000x lower than Ethereum’s. Your transactions on Endemic cost only several cents.

Not only that but as soon as we launch Endemic main net will have a free period with transaction fees going up to 0$. 100% Free.

How did Aurora prompt us to collaborate with them?

Endemic is a swift reaction to the fact that low-quality art is currently oversaturating the NFT market. We wanted to battle that with objectively better and higher quality art, professionally curated art of all styles and types, social segment, a unique combination of art & sports, connecting physical art world and virtual NFT world, better tech, zero waste, no upfront costs — free mint and gas for all!

Looking for the best possible solution to follow these requirements, and the right tech for our product leaning to Ethereum 2.0, we decided Aurora is the one. Aurora chooses to have ETH as a native coin for transactions while for example, the Polygon network uses Matic, and the Fantom network uses FTM. This way they have their own coin to run the network with different tokenomics but provide a familiar experience of Ethereum for the developers and users. Aurora knows they do not need a new coin and even chooses not to use the Near coin. Big move.

The reason lies in the fact that Aurora is not a blockchain, it is an EVM smart contract on top of the Near protocol. It inherits the block time and consensus mechanism from the Near network which is just amazing and we haven’t seen any other network attempt to archive something like this.

To put it simply, the Layer 2 scaling is literally just a smart contract on the main chain, and in contrast to many other side chains, Aurora does not validate blocks off the chain. All the validation happens on the actual Ethereum and the Near blockchains. This approach is viewed from the user side as just paying ETH to the protocol, while in fact, it is the $NEAR token that is used for the fees, and RPC nodes acting as proxies/relayers between the user and the NEAR blockchain.

To put security in focus — this means that all the users need to trust is the Ethereum and Near consensus mechanism which makes Aurora and its bridge, as a part of the NEAR Rainbow Bridge, the only fully trustless asset bridge in the Ethereum industry. (Thanks to @Whiteboard Crypto for explaining these awesome facts about Aurora in this video.)

We believe joining Aurora with Endemic will be a good combination of technology. Our final goal is to create an amazing premium social art NFT station for the whole community via Aurora tech. Truly a gift to artists, art lovers, collectors, and developers.

What is next?

We are in the test net stage, making the final preparations and checks for deploying to the main net. You can see how some main features like having an artist profile, commenting and communicating, buying, and auction will look like on the main net.

👀 Peak into Endemic: https://testnet.endemic.app/

2. Our smart contracts just passed the Zokyo audit process with the highest score, so Endemic will be completely secure for our community and users. Stay tuned for the report!

3. Already at the launch, you can expect a large number of onboarded artists on the Endemic marketplace and some of them you could hear in our first Endemic AMA on Thursday. In case you missed it, jump into our Discord channel and be there when next happens.

Your feedback means a lot to us and we would really like to hear what you say about Endemic. Share your opinion on this Google form! ❤

In case you still don’t know…what is Endemic?

Endemic is a new NFT marketplace that runs on cool, fresh and original concepts and builds better and more modern tech and art. With a humane and anti-corporate attitude and a personal approach without mint and gas costs, we are an ideal marketplace for both new and renowned foreign and local artists starting in the NFT sphere. Endemic is not an anaemic, colourless, mainstream marketplace — we are the cool alternative.

Bit more facts about what our invite-only NFT premium art station is:

Custom made
Artist/creator centric
Focused on quality art
With emphasized and developed social network components adapted in the crypto sphere
NFT Marketplace with soul

On top of this, to run our vision flawlessly we decided to adopt Aurora to solve the high fees hustle.

Endemic is a specialized project, the result of testing with other platforms, learning, improving imperfections, and giving it our final touch. Along the way, we already gathered a huge amount of feedback and realized that we are ready. Curious about the platform? Read more in our launch article!

Also, stay tuned for our explanatory posts about NFT metaverse, Endemic unique features, token launch, whitelisting, competitions, more partnerships, and VR meetups! We are just starting, don’t miss a thing!

Join our channels and find out more!